test please delete

[original PM]

Back from 2 pub visits

2nd one was a checky two with one of my other brothers.

We talked football cos the new season has started don't you know.

[SueEllen]

Puncture repaired.

Dinner eaten - was burgers.

Controlled myself and didn't go to the chippy.

Now need to choose something to watch....

[NickFitz]

Happily the ZeitBroadband has now returned from its previous inactive state which always pisses me off.

They seem to do stuff in the exchange on Sunday afternoons.

This time it was a Saturday.

Virgin Media tend to do stuff shortly after midnight. If you're a victim and are watching streaming stuff, the quality will suddenly degrade and you may lose the connection altogether

Their explanation was that they have to do it some time, and doing it in the day wouldn't be acceptable so their systems do it at midnight, or just after. I tried to argue that doing it at, say, four in the morning would be likely to cause problems to fewer people, but the point was lost on them, presumably because they live in Amish communities where the notion of somebody being up after midnight seems completely ridiculous

[NickFitz]

This twitter-reading bot thing is deployed using Chef, which involves a number of steps to get it working on AWS. I've been going through these manually, which is a bit of a pain. I've just discovered that I obviously thought so months ago, when I wrote a shell script (like a batch file, but more so) which does the entire package/upload/deploy process in one go, which I forgot all about and have just rediscovered sitting in the directory in plain sight. Turns out using that, as I intended myself to do, is much easier

[SueEllen]

Virgin Media tend to do stuff shortly after midnight. If you're a victim and are watching streaming stuff, the quality will suddenly degrade and you may lose the connection altogether

I have a BT phone line and some company offered me an internet connection for a couple of quid so I took it up simply because Virgin do weird things at night. (Plus the fact I can't put the faster Virgin line through the company otherwise.)

Their explanation was that they have to do it some time, and doing it in the day wouldn't be acceptable so their systems do it at midnight, or just after. I tried to argue that doing it at, say, four in the morning would be likely to cause problems to fewer people, but the point was lost on them, presumably because they live in Amish communities where the notion of somebody being up after midnight seems completely ridiculous

The real reason is because the people they hire are so tulip if they don't start at midnight there is the possibility that it will roll into a working day, then they will get loads of business users complaining and will have to pay them compensation. Unless you are a large enough business you are on the same infrastructure as everyone else you just have different times set up from when they will hammer your connection.

[zeitghost]

The first feature of today's entertainment was a little film called "Goodfellas" which, unlike NF, I watched on a double sided dvd that you had to get up & turn over FFS.

Plus it confused the player a bit so I had to use the zoom on the tv instead.

And it does use a fair amount of the piano section of "Layla".

Goodfellas (1990) - IMDb

Not only that, I completely forgot about the NZ cop thing & only caught 25 mins of the last of the 4 eps.

I am devastated.


So that was 25 mins of the NZ motorway patrol followed by 55 mins of the NZ highway patrol.

I think I liked the cow attempting to & succeeding in escaping from the horsebox the most.

I was also amused by the drunk lady driving the unregistered Vauxhall Chevette who didn't have a driving licence.

There was a passenger in the Chevette.

A parrot in a cage.

And bits of the Chevette broke off when the cop was driving it.

Which is pretty true to life in my experience, bits of trim were very fragile in that POS.

[NickFitz]

To the Chinese for dinner

They weren't that busy, though they had been in the week, the woman who runs the place informed me. Indeed, many regular Saturday customers had ordered on Thursday instead. Neither she nor I were able to formulate a valid hypothesis as to why this might have been

[vetran]

Dead Chuck & chips at the usual.

£16 well spent.


washed down with a pleasant Merlot.

its chicken & chips it is not exactly the guild of sommeliers.

[zeitghost]

To the Chinese for dinner

They weren't that busy, though they had been in the week, the woman who runs the place informed me. Indeed, many regular Saturday customers had ordered on Thursday instead. Neither she nor I were able to formulate a valid hypothesis as to why this might have been

Sunspots & a meteor shower.

Simples.

[NickFitz]

Tonight's exploration of the world of cinema commenced with Contact, in which Jodie Foster does an excellent job of increasing public awareness of SETI, and it's made very clear that Carl Sagan had an extremely low opinion of politicians, as do all right-thinking people

After that, I remembered that when I bought The Bank Job which I watched last week, the cheapest option was to get it in a two disk set with another film featuring Jason Statham: Chaos. This involved various kinds of mayhem, which I am given to understand is Mr. Statham's speciality, and managed to overcome the rather odd situation of a bloke with an East London accent working as a veteran detective of the Seattle police department by largely ignoring it, apart from one rather barbed comment about the appalling state of English grammar among the residents of our rebellious colony. Overall, very good if you like a bit of mayhem

Goodnight all